There is nothing better than listening to a great brass band in relaxed cruise control mode.

Cory were out to entertain in Harrogate, and with an enthusiastic audience more than ready to lap up every last drop of their excellence, they simply turned on the showboat taps and let the high-class music making pour out.

Shaken and stirred

‘Star Wars’ and the ‘Overture to The Marriage of Figaro’ immediately tickled the taste buds, before Steve Stewart brought the house down with a ‘Live and Let Die’ that would have had Cubby Broccoli looking for the Scotsman’s telephone number in his contacts book if he could have got rid of Roger Moore.  Everyone in the hall was left shaken and stirred by his outrageously brilliant playing.

The first half was brought to a close with Philip Harper’s touching musical portrait of Roald Dahl – a complex man with an imagination that perfectly summed up the ‘remarkable’ adjective of the music’s title. At the close you felt like Charlie Bucket after he had won a Willy Wonka ‘Golden Ticket’.

Flamboyant

Elsewhere, the musical contrasts were just as flamboyantly marked - from the sizzling ‘Candide Overture’ and Tom Hutchinson on buzzing Bruce Lee form in ‘The Green Hornet’, to the melancholic sounds of ‘Myfanwy’ and mystery of ‘They Shall Come from the East’.

‘Sweet Georgian Brown’ and Glyn Williams whizzing through Hartmann’s ‘La Belle Americaine’ at the blink of an eye set things up for the thunderous ‘Finale from Symphony No 4’ by Tchaikovsky, before the encore of Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ brought the concert to a stunning close.

If this was Cory in cruise control – then heaven help their rivals when they really put their foot to the contest stage metal.

Brendan Wilson